


all of the kids back home believing much more than you do

by eatcheeseliveforever



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Fix-It, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Self-Indulgent, Suicidal Thoughts, anything is possible when you stop using Derry-scented body wash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:35:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22319485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eatcheeseliveforever/pseuds/eatcheeseliveforever
Summary: "Richie," Mike said, "you're not going to find a resurrection ritual on Google.""I've found hundreds," said Richie.  "Funny thing, though, they all seem to call for orgies.  Or virgin sacrifices.  Or sacrificing someone's virginityinan orgy.  I'm hoping Ben will volunteer as tribute."
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 34
Kudos: 263





	all of the kids back home believing much more than you do

"I've been talking to Bill," said Mike, "and, Richie, I'm concerned."

There was a kind of whooshing noise in Richie's head that he didn't think had been there before he'd picked up the phone. Was it alcohol-induced tinnitus? Was it an auditory hallucination? Shit, was he hallucinating this _call_? "I know," he said, "I tried to tell him that the sad dad garage band is a terrible idea but he's already getting mic stands and amps and drum sets and all sorts of things to trip over."

Mike sighed. "Richie--"

"Are those waves I hear in the background? Are you on the beach?"

"A boat, actually," murmured Mike. "I'm on a whale-watching cruise."

Richie mouthed the words "whale watching cruise" to himself. Empirically he knew such things existed, that they happened not far away from the coast where he lived, but it felt like several fucking galaxies away from where he was, surrounded by the ghosts of takeouts and blackouts past and the actual ghost-ghosts, who he couldn't step in or stub his toe on at three in the morning, but hurt so much worse.

"He said you've been googling resurrection rituals."

Richie scrounged through his pile of empties, hoping one wasn't. "Bill talks too much."

"Richie." A sigh, or a wave, or a really quiet whale. "You're not going to find a resurrection ritual on Google."

"I've found hundreds," said Richie. "Funny thing, though, they all seem to call for orgies. Or virgin sacrifices. Or sacrificing someone's virginity _in_ an orgy. I'm hoping Ben will volunteer as tribute."

This time it was definitely a sigh. "Richie, I--"

"I mean, I know he was saving himself for Beverly, but just maybe she hasn't deflowered him yet."

"Doubtful," said Mike. "Very doubtful. Richie, if you really want to find a real resurrection ritual--"

Ever since Derry, emotions had been hitting Richie like they were hurricanes and he was some shitty tourist town on one of Florida's coasts. He waded through the grief and the loss and the memory of the light gone from Eddie's eyes and the sound of his screams the first time he'd almost died and how they had just left him there, of course he wanted to find a real resurrection ritual, and in the eye of it he could hear Mike saying, "--personal occult library. I'll send you a copy of my keys."

"What." He was crying. Mike, thank fuck, didn't mention it.

"The spells in the books I've collected are more likely to work than anything you find on the internet, Richie. And very few of them require a virgin sacrifice."

Because Mike had been talking to Bill, Richie suspected they might have cooked this up together, to give him something to do, to get him out of the house. And, okay, he was living in squalor and he hadn't shaved or showered for a week, and maybe, just fucking maybe, it might do Richie good even if it meant going back to Derry. If he didn't find anything in Mike's spooky books, he could always burn the town to the ground and salt the earth after. That would be cathartic. Give him a sense of closure. Like twenty years of therapy rolled in to one giant fiery conflagration. "I wasn't really going to sacrifice Ben," he said.

"Uh-huh," said Mike. "Do I need to arrange for a plane ticket for you too?"

"No." What had Bill been telling him? Richie wasn't going to pick up Bill's FaceTime calls anymore. Fucking traitor. "Is it, uh, going to be weird, me being there?" One of the empties was only half-empty. Richie took a sip of stale beer and then wished he hadn't.

"I'm currently making the most out of months of accumulated vacation and sick leave," Mike said. "But I have a sofa bed, and I'll let you know if I have to come back suddenly. Just stay out of the staff's way and don't throw up on library property again and I think we're good."

Richie exhaled. "That was one time."

-

When Richie got to Mike's domain, fit the second of two DHL'd keys into the lock in a fog of jetlag and hangover, he walked in on Ben and Bev having sex.

Well, not exactly. Beverly was sitting in the loveseat and her blouse was unbuttoned and Ben's face was doing something in her cleavage.

"Oh my god," said Richie. If he'd been prepared for it, he'd have wolf-whistled and said something rude, but he wasn't prepared for it. Ben and Bev there, alive and making love, just made the black pit of despair that was currently the contents of Richie's torso blacker and pittier and more despairing. "What are you doing here? Apart from the obvious?"

"Mike thought you could use research assistance," said Ben, blushing furiously.

"Mike thought it'd be a good idea to watch you in case you decided research was too difficult and it'd be easier to crawl into the ruins of the house on Neibolt Street to be with Eddie again," said Beverly, standing up, and as Richie was about to cry all over again because, shit, that sounded like something he would do, something he wanted to do, she hugged him, and he cried. Ben came around the back and hugged him and he was too depressed to say anything, or even enjoy it.

For the longest time they just stood there in a tangle, and Richie cried himself dry. Beverly kissed his forehead and let him go.

Ben coughed. "I also brought you some edibles, because all the rituals I could online find involve mind-altering drugs."

Richie felt kind of bad about considering using Ben as a virgin sacrifice to bring Eddie back, even though, according to Bill, Mike had all the mind-altering drugs they might need. "Thanks," he said, and blew his nose on the Kleenex Ben provided. Maybe Mike would make a good virgin sacrifice instead, but he couldn't even be mad at Mike. "You two get back to making Ben unusable for a virgin sacrifice, I'm going to--" He gestured, hurried deeper into the apartment even though he didn't really know where Mike's bedroom was, luggage squeaking along behind him.

Mike's bedroom turned out to be a kind of loft deal up the death trap staircase with a small bed, free weights in the corner, and several floating bookshelves filled with books that looked like they'd been bound in human skin. The titles were written in old-ass gothic font.

"That's not creepy at all." Richie tried to call up Mike to yell at him about the babysitters and also to ask him how he fucking slept with those books looming over him, but it went straight to voicemail. So he called Bill.

"Dude," he said, "I'm here at Mike's and there's about two hundred pounds on this barbell. This is madness, we're the Losers, not gym rats." Richie could hear the stuffiness in his own voice, the traces of his sobfest from earlier.

Bill didn't say anything about that, but between the drink and the crying jags maybe Richie always sounded like that. "I bought a stationary bike two weeks ago."

"Et tu, Bille," said Richie, and hung up on him. It felt good. He flopped back onto Mike's ridiculously spartan bed, covered his face with a pillow, and was asleep within ten minutes.

-

When he woke up it was to a text from Mike apologizing. Not for putting Richie on suicide watch, but for having his phone turned off because he was at a performance of Hamilton.  
It was eleven a.m. California time, two p.m. Derry time, and if Richie had any resentment about Mike going to a Broadway musical while Richie was sleep-crying into his pillow, it evaporated when he got into Mike's living room and saw Beverly leaning out of the window, smoking a cigarette, not hiding her nerves. Derry hadn't been the greatest place to grow up for Richie, but he had a lot of good memories here. He and Stan and Bill and Eddie had been friends for a long time--he'd known Stan since they were toddlers, which he sometimes suspected was the only reason Stan had put up with him--and his parents and his siblings were generally okay. Richie wasn't close to his family, but that was mostly because he sucked. He called his parents on Mother's Day and Father's Day, his sister on her birthday, his brother on his birthday, and saw everybody on Thanksgiving except when he was touring, or on the rare occasion his family flew out of the frozen Midwest to see California.

Beverly hadn't had friends before the Losers Club, and her only family here had been a creepy psycho. Mike had been homeschooled, an orphan. Richie didn't blame him one bit for wanting to get the fuck out of Derry. It was the shitty racist town that had killed his parents and he'd stayed, for years, for _decades_ , to keep watch for the return of that fucking clown. Richie had one reason and one reason only to be back here, but Beverly was here for him.

"Got one of those for me?" he asked.

She tossed him the package and he fumbled one out. She lit it for him with a monogrammed rose-gold lighter. For that millisecond Richie felt extremely classy.

"Ben's out shopping," she said. She crossed the room, picked up one of those mismatched pieces of Goodwill flatware that Richie remembered owning in his early twenties before he became a real adult and started eating straight from the box or over whatever junk mail was on hand, and put it on the windowsill to use as an ashtray. "I told him you're okay with anything for dinner as long as it isn't Chinese."

"I see," said Richie. "We can pretend like it was me smoking."

She snorted. "I may hold you to that."

"This fucking town," he said, "am I right? You know, I'll be okay on my own. You and Ben don't have to be here."

Beverly had never had time for his bullshit. It was simultaneously the best and worst thing about her. "I think we do." She blew smoke out the window. If everything went haywire, at least Richie knew she'd be on his side re: burning Derry to the ground. "We want to be here for you."

His breakdown in the quarry had been all kinds of awful, but there had been the tiniest little silver lining in that Richie realized then, in the grip of his friends, that they knew. They knew he was gay, they knew he'd been in love with Eddie, they _had_ to, and they loved him anyway. It didn't make a difference to them. The only one there afraid of Richie's sexuality had been Richie. He'd thought they'd leave him, and yet here they were, here for him. In advance, even. He didn't feel like he deserved this, almost didn't want to think about it. "You could have staged an intervention in London instead."

"Why? What's wrong with Bill?"

And she was probably glad Ben wasn't there to see that, either. "He's talking about forming a band."

"What?"

"Does Ben play an instrument? Because he's gonna get drafted. There's not much Bill can do with one of those wooden blocks you hit." Richie made the sound, rattling his tongue off his teeth.

Beverly didn't laugh. "Ben plays the guitar," she said, all wistful and dreamy. "He picked it up in college. He's pretty good at it."

Okay, thought Richie, there was only so much pity he could have for his friends. Ben and Bev were doing fine, return to Derry aside, Mike was off living it up with the whales, Bill was probably going to make it to the rock and roll hall of fame for his transformative work as a cowbellist. If it were some sort of judgment for being a shittier person than all his friends, Richie would have accepted his current misery, if only Eddie were still alive.

He felt a lump in his throat and glanced around Mike's living room. There were books on the shelves here too. None of the creepy human skin stuff, but they looked old, and worn, and had titles like _Harnessing the Wyrm_ and _Bloodwork_ and _The Seventh Veil_ and _A History of Derry 1791-1891_.

"It's becoming real clear how Mike managed to stay single all those years," Richie muttered, and grabbed the Wyrm book. "Hey, is Ben buying booze?"

"None of the hard stuff." Beverly ground her cigarette out, picked up a moleskin notebook from one of the chairs. "We should all drink responsibly."

Richie had never believed in doing anything responsibly. "Your boyfriend brought weed," he reminded her, settling down on another chair and creaking open the book's spine.

 _Harnessing the Wyrm_ , it turned out, was creepier on the inside.

"So," said Richie, "you take the skull of a lamb, and you boil it in piss until all the flesh falls off, and then you wrap it in sateen, which must be like the spooky version of satin or something, and bury it under a yew on the new moon. This is like one of those recipes where halfway through it turns out you're supposed to have been soaking the dried fruit for a week before you start. Only with piss."

"You don't really strike me as someone who does a lot of cooking, Richie."

The last time he'd really tried was when Trudie and Derek and their kids had been staying at his place when they went to Disneyland. He'd tried, he'd failed, and he'd ordered pizza and Thai and soul food all week and cemented his place as Ollie and Hailie's favorite uncle. Trudie had given him this look like she knew he was a failure at adult life and she forgave him because she hadn't really expected anything else. "Hey, I make a mean microwaved grilled cheese," he said, and kept on reading. "Then you dig the skull back out on full moon, smear it with the ointment you were supposed to make from lamb fat and piss and mugwort and just a pinch of thyme, smear yourself with the ointment too, stand over the grave and chant, Esira, esira, unhappy spirit." He cleared his threat. "Esira, esira, wandering soul. I call you forth from your cold, lonely grave. I call you back to the world of the living."

It was a short incantation and a stupid incantation but Richie found himself holding back his breath, and tears, at the end of it. Like it actually might have worked, even without the piss and sheep brain moisturizer.

And then there were steps on the stairs up to Mike's apartment, and then the door opened and--

It was Ben.

"Well," said Richie, "that was anticlimactic."

Beverly got up to help Ben with the bags. "Richie's started rummaging through Mike's spellbooks."

"Oh!" Ben looked way more excited than Richie felt. "Find anything good?"

"No," Richie said. Would it always be like that, the stupid hope that every ritual would work, the crushing disappointment when it didn't? And the cold, lonely grave bit had not been an image he'd needed in his head. He was pretty sure that if they did resurrect Eddie, he was going to kill them all for leaving him in a completely unsanitary clownhole, and, oddly, that cheered Richie up.

Ben's face had fallen. "I'm sure there will be something somewhere. Hey, I got tacos for dinner!"

-

Late that night, when Richie was falling asleep over another creepy-ass book, he took a picture of a spell called "A Charme to Restore Vitalite to the Nether Regions" and sent it to Bill, with the message, _Hey, I found your garage band a surefire chart topper._

Then he followed it with, _I just had what passes for Mexican food in rural Maine and I'll let you know when I find a ritual to defeat that eldritch horror because IT NEVER SLEEPS._

-

Bill's response was a middle finger emoji, a pukey green face emoji, and to snitch to Mike.

Richie was sitting in the living room. He was flipping through another book, his laptop open to take notes. Beverly was curled up in one of the armchairs, making sketches for next fall's collection in her moleskin notebook. Ben was doing his morning workout.

Mike's call came when Richie was wondering if the book he was currently reading was just a bunch of Blue Oyster Cult lyrics run through Google Translate a few times. Or maybe that was the magic of Blue Oyster Cult. The Ritual of Chud definitely sounded like it could have been one of their b-sides.

He was also, because Please Do Not Anxiety Over Agricultural Harvest Worker wasn't that intriguing, idly considering going over and sitting on Ben's back during a push-up. Would Ben be able do a push-up with Richie sitting on his back? It was for science, and not because he was jealous, and definitely not because he wanted to stop Ben from doing push-ups like there was nothing wrong in the world.

"Bill says you've been reading the Dresden," Mike said, without preamble, a kind of clopping in the background.

"What?" said Richie. "Did you join his band? Are you playing the wood block for him now? Is that what that noise is?"

"No," said Mike. "I'm on a horse."

And Richie couldn't help himself, it was his fucking mouth that took off with, "On a horse or, like, on a horse? Sorry, but I've been reading your books and they are deeply messed up--"

"I know," said Mike again. "It looks like you started with the books in the main room. Don't read those books, Richie."

"Now you tell me," he said. And just when he'd gotten the hang of Population Centers Ablaze with Stone Revolution.

Mike was quiet for a moment, the horse walking along placidly in the background. Richie thought he could hear a waterfall. Why was Mike even calling him when he could be enjoying his nice horse ride with no spooky shit at all? "I thought you might spend some time adjusting." More drinking, maybe some of Ben's drugs, sobbing in bed for seventy-two hours. Richie'd done that adjusting, minus the drugs, in Los Angeles. "I'm just glad you didn't waste your time on the McGuire or the Hobb. Tell you what--send me a picture of the bookshelves in my bedroom and I'll circle the reliable sources, cross off the ones that are pretty much worthless."

"What about the ones in your living room?"

Mike sighed his grown up and responsible librarian sigh. "I'm not going to leave books of magic around where anyone can get to them, Richie," he said.

Richie might have asked who the hell were these theoretical persons coming to Mike's apartment, but he was definitely in a stones and glass houses situation there. At least Ben had lived in a giant fuckoff ranch in the middle of nowhere. Mike had been a bit of a hermit in a racist small town. Richie had been lonely in a city of millions.

"All right," he said. He took the picture. He sent the picture. "But you're going to break Bill's heart when you tell him the Viagra spell doesn't work."

-

After that, though, he was sort of at a loose end, waiting for Mike to finish his horse ride and give Richie some pointers about which books weren't bogus. Normally Richie would waste the wait time getting drunk and fucking around on Netflix, but one) it wasn't even noon, not that that would normally stop him, and two) Ben and Beverly would see him at it. They might have been here to keep him from harming himself too much, but this was beginning to feel embarrassing. And three) he'd probably fall down those janky-ass wooden stairs and break his neck, and that would definitely be embarrassing.

Which was why, when Ben suggested it, Richie agreed to go jogging with him.

It was a terrible idea. About a mile or eight hours in, Richie's legs felt like wet noodles and his lungs felt like papier mâché and his heart was pounding and his hair was itchy with sweat and he took one second for a breather and looked up and saw the old ice cream store and thought _Eddie--_ , and completely lost it.

"Shit," he said, as Ben reflexively grabbed him into a hug. His glasses were sliding off but it didn't matter, he was seeing the past, one of those days where Eddie had gone full little prick on him, deciding he wanted to swap ice creams even after Richie had taken a bite out of the vanilla. And he'd only let Eddie have the chocolate to begin with because everyone knew chocolate was better than vanilla, and Richie had been astonished that Eddie even wanted it after Richie had gotten his germs all over it, and Eddie had said, "I'll show you germs," and licked his whole hand and smeared it on Richie's face and Richie had kind of died and gone to heaven even if he could never let anyone know.

And now here he was, in the middle of Derry, having a meltdown while a hot, half-naked guy held him, and no one was batting an eye, no mob was forming to beat him up and throw him off a bridge.

Then again, if anybody even looked at them funny, Richie would reflexively tell them his sports team had lost. Or that he'd just been dumped by their mom.

Shit.

"Shit," he said, and tugged up his shirt so he could blow his nose on it. He wiped off his glasses with whatever part of his shirt wasn't completely soaked in sweat so he didn't have to see Ben looking at him with concern. "All these fucking memories, man."

"I know," said Ben.

Richie wanted to snap, what the fuck, no you don't, but just because Ben wasn't having a breakdown in the middle of the street didn't mean he wasn't suffering. Also, he'd always felt kind of protective of Ben from the very beginning, which he supposed was the inevitable result of meeting someone when they'd had half their stomach fucking carved up and then fallen down a hillside. "I told Eddie to suck the wound," he remembered. "I was winding him up, but I also wanted to see if he'd do it."

"The two of you had something special," said Ben, and only Ben could say that and mean it with one hundred percent sincerity.

Richie blew his nose. It was that or start bawling again. "Can we just go back to Mike's? If I run any more I'm going to puke, I don't know how you do this every day."

"I worked up to it," said Ben. "Also it's not every day, I take two rest days a week where my only exercise is yoga."

"Get the fuck out of here," Richie said, but then he hugged Ben again, rested his forehead against his. So what if people saw him, what was the worst that could happen, when the worst had already happened. Eddie was dead. 

When they got back to Mike's--and it said a lot about fucking Derry that two grown, sweaty men could let themselves into the staff entrance of the public library and no one even batted an eye--Richie spent like an hour in Mike's spearmint green seventies shower, and Ben and Bev had the courtesy to pretend not to be talking about him when he got out.

Mike had got back to him, the photo giving him maybe twenty books to work with. As he got dressed, he could hear Ben and Beverly resuming their conversation. Richie grabbed one of the Mike Hanlon-approved books and tried to listen to Ben and Bev despite knowing that it was never a good idea to eavesdrop on people talking about him because he never heard anything nice.

But the second he started reading the book, he forgot about what they were saying about him anyway, because he knew. He knew, suddenly, what Mike had been talking about, although he didn't know _how_ he knew. Richie wasn't into any of that mumbo-jumbo crap, and shapeshifting alien clown monsters aside, really didn't believe in the supernatural. He hadn't expected the Ritual of Chud to work, he'd sat through church bored and staring at Jesus's abs, he'd eaten the cookies and drank the milk his parents left out for Santa Claus. But it was like this switch had been flipped, and--

Oh. Oh. Shapeshifting alien clown monster and Richie had looked deep into one another's eyes. Beverly had seen how all the Losers died when she was in the deadlights. Richie had apparently picked up a sense for the supernatural and a shitload of dad jokes.

He turned the pages idly. A spell to make your orchards fruitful. A spell to cure an ailing cow. A spell to drown your enemies in their own phlegm. It was like somewhere behind his eyes, there was this new part of his brain going _yes, yes, let's remember that one for later, Fallon won't know what hit him._

He sent a quick _thank you, can't believe I ever doubted your creepy book collection and your librarian superpowers_ text to Mike, and kept reading. He was almost through the first book, no resurrection spells in sight (Mike had warned him a lot of these books lacked tables of contents and indices because they were old as balls, not that that was his exact phrasing) when there were footsteps on the stairs.

"Richie?" asked Beverly. "Are you coming down for dinner?"

"Is dinner going to be hamburger helper in cardboard with shredded lettuce and canned fried onions again?" Richie asked, and then realized the sun was setting through Mike's window.

Beverly smiled at him, the light bathing her in red and orange, pink and purple. "I convinced him we should try pizza. Derry can't ruin pizza, can it?"

"I suppose we'll find out," said Richie, threw the book on Mike's bed, and went down to eat.

-

When he got back to Mike's sad bachelor loft (how the fuck did it support a bed and Richie and Richie's luggage and a home gym, he sometimes wanted to know, but he also didn't want to worry too much about falling to his death to dwell on it), he saw Bill had left him a bunch of texts.

 _Dude,_ he asked, _why are you spamming me with Red Hot Chili Pepper lyrics?_

Richie'd had a few beers with the pizza, which actually had exceeded all his admittedly low expectations of Derry fast food, and he was almost nodding off to sleep when Bill's answer came: _it's that dumb penis enhancement spell you sent me. It didn't rhyme or scan then, but it does now. You're welcome._

In his dream Richie was eleven years old again and it was Christmas and he and his siblings were sitting around the tree in a pile of wrapping paper. Trudie had gotten an electric French Horn and Mattie had gotten an Etch A Sketch and Richie had gotten a turtle but the turtle, he understood by dream logic, was also Keanu Reeves.

"So," said dream Mattie, "now that you're gay, does it mean you're going to quit it with the nonstop dick jokes at Christmas and making my girlfriend uncomfortable?"

"No," said dream Richie, "it means I'm going to tell twice the dick jokes but none of the boob jokes. It's like you don't even know me."

Skibbity bop bop, said dream Trudie's electric horn.

The turtle who was also Keanu Reeves looked at Richie and said, "Be excellent to one another."

"Sure, dude," said dream Richie, "whatever you say, you're the turtle."

"And be excellent for one another. And excellent with one another."

Dream Richie was going to ask if that meant he and Bev and Ben were going to have to do the ritual orgy after all, but then his phone alarm buzzed and he woke up and saw Bill's texts and he knew, he just knew, and he called Mike.

"Hey," he said, "is customizing a ritual a thing you can do? I mean, I know we all got tokens that represented specific things to us for Chud, even though it didn't work, but I'm talking about changing the words and the chalk circles and the iguana blood or whatever to reflect--is that glass?"

Mike took that question, like he did a lot of other things, into stride. "I'm at a wine tasting."

"Dude, it's like nine thirty in the morning."

"In France."

France. Richie certainly wouldn't have answered a call from himself if he were busy getting drunk in France. "Carry on, then."

"I suppose it couldn't hurt," said Mike. "Belief is a large part of magic, and we're all more likely to believe in the things we create."

Richie thought of his material, the old stuff, and the new stuff. The things that weren't written by him. He hadn't believed in that. It had made people laugh, but it wasn't him. And Eddie, across nearly three decades and a mystical bout of amnesia, had fucking known it. "Okay, so, when I find a spell, and Bill rewrites it to sound like the National and Ben corrects the flow of the chalk circle and Beverly coordinates what animal blood is in this season and what pyre is out, can we run it by you or will you be busy touring the Louvre?"

"I saw the Louvre on Tuesday, Richie," Mike said.

Of course he had. "Okay, but you got yourself into this."

"Richie," said Mike warmly, "I volunteered for this twenty-seven years ago, because that's what friends do."

"Yeah," said Richie, a lump in his throat. He couldn't handle sincerity this early in the morning. How had he managed to get so many friends who were so open about emotions? Shit, was he the token deflector? And, he realized, with increasing horror, did that have something to do with Ben and Bev and Mike and Bill having healthy relationships and happy lives? He could practically hear Stan telling him, "Yes, it does," in his _Richie, you're a dumbass_ voice, which was actually his normal voice, or at least the voice he used all the time because Richie was a dumbass all the freaking time. "Shit, we're going to have to bring Stan back if this works and I'm going to spend the rest of my life knowing he's thinking that I'm an idiot from three thousand miles away. Not that he'll be wrong, I just--"

"It'll be okay, Richie," said Mike, and the sincerity was there again. "I'm glad you're doing this."

"That is a whole lot of misplaced faith in me," Richie said, and got up to tell Beverly and Ben that they weren't there just to babysit his ass after all.

-

It took Richie three more days to find a resurrection spell, one that made him sit up on Mike's bed and pump his fist and say, "Yes!" and then, "Ow!" as his elbow smacked the headboard on the backswing.

"Guys!" he yelled, then realized it was actually half past one and Derry was really fucking dark outside his window and there weren't any lights on downstairs.

"Shit," he said. He took out his laptop, began typing up the page, line for line. It was freaking ridiculous, but it felt really fucking right. He stuck it all in Google Docs, shared it with his friends, and, because he was way too hyped up now to sleep, went off into the night.

It was cold, it was dark. It was dumb, what Richie was doing. The house on Neibolt Street had folded in onto itself. There was nothing there. No way to get in. No way to get out. Richie swallowed and pushed the gate open.

"Hey," he said, to the empty fucking lot. "Hang tight, Eddie. We're coming for you. Which makes it sound like we chose the sex ritual after all. We didn't, by the way. No spunk or spit or blood demanded by this ritual at all, dude. It's like it was made for you." How deep under the ground was he? How much dirt, how much rock, how much separated them now? Richie swallowed. "I miss you, man, you know that? I miss you."

The lot was quiet, and cold, and empty. Richie kissed the ground like he was an old-timey sailor finding land before he left it anyway.

Bill called as he was walking back. "I got the link," he said. "Looks a little more reliable than the last spell you sent me."

"Yeah," said Richie. "Send me back one near, far, wherever you are, though, and I will end you."

"Wasn't planning on it, your Celine Dion impression sucks." Bill sounded good, too. Somber, but not like he needed to be reminded to eat at regular intervals. "We're customizing it for Eddie, yeah?"

"Yeah." It had occurred to Richie, during his first frantic day of hunting for a ritual now that he had this thing in his head telling him what would work and what wouldn't, that just maybe that little voice was a poison gift from Pennywise, and that doing a ritual to bring back the dead over Neibolt Street wasn't the greatest idea ever, but Richie was willing to accept those odds. He wasn't going to let anyone else know what he was gambling with, but he'd take precautions.

Man, maybe there was some kind of crazy dust in Mike's laundry detergent that was getting into Richie's head. He really didn't want to think about that.

Bill was quiet a little too. "He'd have hated this."

"Hey, there's no gross stuff in this ritual. But if you're talking about being left in the sewers--"

"I mean you," said Bill. "He was always a-a-acting out, whenever you had a bad day. Remember? That summer, I think the deaths and disap-p-pearances were getting to you--" Generous of Bill to impute that motive to him, instead of the truth, which was that Richie was coming to grips with the fact that he was gay, and the much worse fact that there were people in Derry who'd kill him for it, and the rest of Derry would simply stand by and watch. And maybe that was Derry, maybe it was the clown, but people stood by and watched everywhere. "--and you were quieter than usual, not that that's saying much, and Eddie would go crazy because he could tell something was wrong with you."

Richie winced. _Phrasing,_ he wanted to say, but he had been acting like something was wrong with him. When Eddie had finally cornered him about it--after the clown, before school had started again--Richie's own words hadn't been that great. To be fair, Eddie had started off with barging into Richie's room and demanding to know if he was on his period or something.  
"What the fuck," Richie had said, which had clearly given something away because he'd normally have come back with something about Eddie's mom being on her period.

Eddie had jostled his way onto Richie's bed. Richie had squirmed upright, comic book held in front of him like a shield, and Eddie had--he'd threatened to sit on Richie until Richie told him what the fuck was wrong with him, seriously, and what was wrong with Richie was that he wouldn't have minded it it if Eddie sat on him but he didn't want Eddie to know that.

"Come on, Richie," Eddie had said. "Tell me. Please."

And Richie had sighed and put his comic book down and said, "You know what Stan said back in the clubhouse? About whether we'll still be friends when we grow up." And it wasn't entirely a lie. Richie was fucking terrified that if the other Losers found out, they wouldn't want to be his friends anymore. He didn't have that many friends and already one of them had had to flee Derry because her dad was a creep and because when horrible things happened to kids in Derry, the adults just stood by and watched.

"Oh." Eddie had stopped, then. The frantic energy, the jostling, the attempts to push Richie over so he could sit on him. "Are you worried about that?"

Richie'd shaken his head. "I mean, not about that. A little, but that's like four years from now, right? Eight after college. It's more like--" And even after defeating Pennywise, Richie couldn't force it out, couldn't tell the truth. "My parents are taking us to New York so my sister can look at colleges, and you were talking about your mom's friend who got AIDS from the subway, and-- Would you still be my friend if I got AIDS from a subway pole?"

Eddie had looked at him. "You could always stay at my house," he'd said, despite the fact that Mrs K. loathed Richie with every ounce of her considerable being and would sooner let a bunch of plague-carrying rats spend the night.

"Nah, it's--I'm not not going to go to New York, are you kidding me? But would you still be my friend if I got AIDS?"

Eddie'd slung his arm around Richie, and tipped Richie's head onto his pointy shoulder. "Bill gave me chicken pox when we were six," he'd said. "Richie, I'd still be your friend if you got AIDS even if it was because you're a dumbass who never washes his hands--"

"I wash my hands!"

"--for the recommended twenty-five seconds and sometimes you don't even use soap, you just stick them under the tap and it's lukewarm water. Lukewarm, Richie!" And yet Eddie had grabbed Richie's hand with his right one, despite Richie's shitty hygiene, and he said, while Richie kind of felt like crying and he didn't know why, "I'd be your friend if you got measles or tuberculosis or whatever. Just tell me, moron, because I'm your friend."

And Richie, of course, hadn't told him. Because it had felt really nice to be held by Eddie, because he wasn't feeling too good about the whole being gay equals being sick thing, and because despite what Eddie said, Richie suspected Eddie wanted him to stay with him, and not go to the New York of strange and exciting bodily fluids.

Not that Richie had ever metaphorically gone to New York, but whatever. "Yeah, but he'll be back. And I'll be better." He'd tell Eddie. Maybe not the full extent of it, but Eddie was forty years old and he'd gotten married and presumably he didn't equate sex with cooties anymore, and also he lived in the literal New York and Richie had yet to see a news story about some crazy Purelling the entire route of the gay pride parade. Eddie'd be fine with it. It was Richie who was scared shitless, and always had been.

"Jesus, Richie," said Bill. "I hope so."

-

Of course, Derry was so practiced at looking the other way that it was completely feasible for three strange adults to set up a chalk circle with healing crystals and incense on a vacant lot in the middle of the night without anyone saying boo. If Richie had tried this back in Los Angeles, he'd have been arrested for performance art without a permit, or surrounded by a bunch of hecklers, depending on the neighborhood.

"Okay," said Ben, dusting his hands off. "Is that it?"

"Well, Richie needs to stand in the center and then we can close it off," Bev said. She was starting up her tablet, signing into the meeting. "Mike? You good?"

"I may get thrown out of this yoga retreat if they discover I didn't turn in my cellphone upon sign-in," said Mike. "So I would appreciate it if we could start the ritual soon."

"All right, all right," said Richie. "Ben's just getting Bill on the line."

"It's okay," said Bill, as Ben settled his tablet on the bookstand. "F-fucking Zoom made me go through like three mic checks."

"By the way, hope you don't mind we broke into library storage for some of the props here." For the other props, Ben and Beverly had gotten cooed over by a bunch of old ladies at the craft store, and Richie had spent half an hour being insulted by a secondhand goods store owner. Guy was actually pretty good at it too. "If I ever get famous enough for a roast, you're invited," he'd told the guy. "That is, if you're not dead by then." The guy had said, completely unfuckingflappable, "You're never gonna get that famous." "Su casa being mi casa, and all that."

"He thinks everything belongs to him," Bill confessed. "Like a cat."

Ben bent down to snap the circle closed with a piece of red chalk, and Richie felt it, just a little. He shuffled around in the center until he was facing Beverly. She was North. She was the strongest of them all, the least afraid. She had a serious look on her face, one that said she didn't know if this would work or not but she'd be here for Richie either way.

Richie started muttering under his breath. "And I reach to the sky, and I call out your name--"

"Do not finish that," said Mike. "Not while you're in a circle of power."

He shuffled his feet, awkwardly. "Okay, fine, no Offspring. Whatever."

The spell, as modified by Bill, didn't sound much like the National, and definitely didn't sound anything like Celine Dion. It tickled at the back of Richie's mind, reminding him of one of those bands that had a few big hits early on, and then went on to make CDs whose singles never got heard on the radio, things that maybe turned up on Richie's Spotify if he was drunk and nostalgic enough. Suddenly, stupidly, he remembered how his manager had nixed the idea of naming his last special "What's My Age Again?" because _no one under thirty knows who Blink 182 is, Richie,_ and Richie had both felt incredibly old--he still bought their albums--and also insulted, because he was either hearing, or imagining, the subtext telling him to grow the fuck up. At least the song-slash-spell didn't sound like Blink 182, not when the ritual was calibrated for Eddie. He'd printed it off a library printer, so he could read it out loud, shuffling the pages in the rising wind, when suddenly Beverly gasped and Richie looked down and the circle was fucking glowing, glowing red.

Shit, he thought, and he could see Beverly thinking the same thing, this was actually going to work.

The wind whipped up inside the circle, but only inside it. Ben and Beverly's tablets rattled on the bookstands, but nothing toppled over as Richie read the last verse of the spell, words that were plaintive, and heartfelt, and maybe Bill wasn't half bad at writing lyrics because it'd make a decent ballad, not exactly November Rain but--

Eddie was standing in front of him. Richie dropped all the pages and hugged him so tight he was expecting Eddie to freak out about his oxygen intake. But Eddie was breathing. That was the important thing. He was there, and he was alive, and he was breathing.

"Welcome back," Richie said, when the wind had subsided enough that he could be heard, "Loser."

"Richie," said Eddie. "What--"

"Turns out not all of Mike's spellbooks suck donkey balls."

"It would have worked," murmured Mike. The circle was still glowing red, and Richie didn't know if it was safe to break it yet. Maybe he shouldn't have let go of his copy of the spell. Oops.  
"You..." Eddie turned his head, still not stepping out of Richie's arms. Richie was perfectly fine with that. "You used black magic to bring me back?"

He looked at Bev, at Ben, at the iPads with Mike and Bill's faces peering out of them. He looked at the chalk circle, the beads, the quartered apples, which were apparently a powerful symbol of death.

"Hey, dude, way to assume that just because I'm suddenly doing magic, it's the bad kind, but yeah. Welcome back to the land of the living."

Eddie looked around again, and then back at him, and then away. "Richie, the last thing I said to you was that I fucked your mom, and you still brought me back from the dead?"

Richie took his hands from where they'd been gripping Eddie's back and put them on Eddie's face, turned it so his eyes met Richie's. "Of course I did. You think I was going to let you have the last word?"

Eddie stopped evading Richie's gaze long enough to laugh at that. Didn't sound like he found it very funny, though.

"Come on," he said softly. "This is your chance for a do-over, right? What do you wish your last words had been?"

Eddie shut his eyes. "I don't think I'm brave enough for that," he said.

"Of course you're brave enough! You got that clown right through its face, okay?" He realized that Eddie was still wearing that bandage over his cheek, but he hadn't winced once when Richie's hand pressed into it. "You murdered the leper, remember? Your hands were at his throat? I can't be any scarier than the clown or grosser than the leper, Eddie."

"I--" Eddie swallowed. "That bit you do, about the time that you didn't do laundry for three months? That was the only part of your act that seemed like you."

"Come on, man, that was _one time_ , and I was like, twenty-five," said Richie.

On the circle, somebody made an exaggerated gagging noise. Richie considered flipping Bill off, but that would mean moving away from Eddie and there was no way in hell he was doing that. _Just tell me,_ Eddie had said, all those years ago.

"Dude, it doesn't matter what your last words were. I wasn't going to leave you dead. I mean, I literally wasn't going to leave you, these guys had to drag me away."

Eddie's eyes snapped open. "What the fuck, Richie, it looks like this place collapsed, do you have any idea how dang--"

"I do, and I didn't care, because I loved you, asshole."

"What." Eddie had somehow gotten his fist tangled in Richie's jacket and he wondered if this was it, if any second now Eddie was going to shove him away and tell him that that was somehow grosser than the laundry thing.

"That came out wrong. I love you, asshole. It was past tense because I was relating--"

It was suddenly hard to talk, because Eddie had pressed his face against Richie's and holy shit, it was a kiss. Eddie was kissing him. He was kissing Eddie. Eddie had matched his death grip on Richie's jacket with one in his hair, angling his head down, and it felt a lot sexier than Richie would have expected having his hair pulled to be. He was kind of glad that not only was Eddie not disgusted, he apparently felt the same way, and also that Eddie'd let go of his jacket and was now grabbing his ass, when someone coughed really loudly and Ben said, "Uh, guys--"

"Dude, I have spent the last week waking in on you and Beverly making out, give me a break--"

"Richie," said Beverly, "the circle's stopped glowing. The ritual is complete."

"Oh." Eddie still hadn't let go of his hair. "We can go home now?"

"It should be safe." Mike took a moment, was probably looking at the spell in another window, thank fuck someone had a copy at hand. "Just don't eat any pineapple for a week."

Richie wasn't sure if Eddie was going to ask why, what happened if they did, or reassure Mike that he was allergic to pineapple, but he did neither. "Please don't tell me we're going back to the Townhouse."

"Nah, Mike's sacrificed his place for the greater good," said Richie, just as Beverly coughed.

"Ben and I will stay here to clean up, and then we probably are going to the townhouse," she said. Ben had zero objections.

In the car, on the way back, Eddie was mostly quiet, which was weird, and then about two minutes away from the library he asked, "Why didn't you say anything?"

"I was a kid," Richie said. "I was dumb. I was scared. But also, I don't know. I knew I liked guys, but I knew I loved you, and I didn't really understand the difference."

"I knew I loved you too," said Eddie quietly, and Richie nearly crashed the car. "I wasn't really thinking about sex or anything, unless you brought it up, and then I was so pissed at you because sex was gross and you were gross, but I still loved you."

"You sure know how to make a guy feel special," said Richie, but he couldn't even manage to make it sound sarcastic because Eddie had loved him. Eddie probably still loved him, if their makeout session over his grave was anything to go by. "And I'll have you know I brushed my teeth after dinner tonight."

"But when did you last floss?" Eddie asked as Richie parked the car. His voice was completely deadpan. He was ribbing Richie about dental hygiene, and Richie didn't know it was possible to love him any more than he already did. Also, whether Richie had flossed or not turned out to be completely irrelevant since Eddie kissed him again anyway. Richie was probably going to trip and break his neck on the stairs up to Mike's place but at least he'd die happy.

"So, um," said Richie, getting the door open, "I know this place probably isn't up to code, but with Ben and Bev gone at least you don't have to see what's up in Mike's loft."

"Why?" said Eddie, taking in the apartment. Bill said it used to be littered with stacks of books and piles of paper and a bunch of weirdass artifacts, so it could have been worse, it could have been way worse. "What's in Mike's loft?"

"My dirty laundry."

Eddie punched him in the shoulder. "Asshole. Does he have a bathroom?"

"Oh," said Richie. Yeah, there was still the bandage on Eddie's cheek, the shirt stiff with dried blood. In retrospect, it was kind of amazing that Eddie had wanted to discuss feelings with Richie in the car instead of diving for the wet wipes. "It's this way," he said, and then stopped as, in his peripheral vision, Eddie shrugged off his hoodie and shirt in one go.

"Shit," he said, staring at Eddie's abs. His pecs. His arms, which were really fucking nice.

Eddie glanced down and brushed off his skin, flakes of blood falling to the floor. "The wound's gone."

"I'm not talking about the wound, I'm talking about--" Richie put his hands on Eddie, because he could. "You're hot."

"I work out," said Eddie. "You gotta do both cardio and resistance and there's a gym in my apartment building--"

"You can detail your routine all you want, I'm just going to stand here and admire the finished project."

"Admire it later." Eddie reached up and, with a wince, peeled his bandage off. "Shower now."

Richie managed to shut himself up before asking if Eddie was serious. There was a saying about gift horses and mouths but Richie was planning on looking _everywhere_. He got undressed, feeling definitely less sexy about it than Eddie, and just as he was climbing into the tub behind Eddie, Eddie reached out and tweaked off his glasses.

Which was actually comforting, in a _yes, this is your life, Richie Tozier, and not some demented clown fucking with your head_ kind of way. "You used to do that to me a lot," he said.

"Yeah," said Eddie. No apologies. "You let me. Sometimes you'd chase me around to get them back, dude, but you let me."

He remembered that, running after an Eddie-shaped blur. For all the dietary restrictions Eddie's mom had put him on for his allergies, she'd somehow decided sugar, and lots of it, was okay. "Wait," said Richie, "did you like me chasing after you?"

Richie couldn't see Eddie's face very clearly without his glasses, but he thought Eddie was blushing. "Let's just shower, okay?"

"Should I chase you towards the shower head?"

"Don't you dare, statistically the bathroom is the most dangerous room in the house," grumbled Eddie, as he bent down to adjust the faucets. Richie pulled the green curtain shut around them.

It wasn't a giant shower, and the water pressure sucked, but it was a shower. Richie had been in it maybe ten, twelve hours ago, so he didn't really need it again, but Eddie--the water that was running off him was pink. Richie commandeered the bar of soap, got some lather going, and started to wash.

"The recommended twenty-five seconds," Richie told Eddie, as he was squeezing the back of his thighs. Eddie's hands were gripping his shoulders and Richie was about eye-level with Eddie's dick, which looked blurry but nice, not that Richie had seen that many other guys' dicks. Even so, there was something distinctly cute about Eddie's dick, not that Richie would ever say it, he'd pretty much be asking for a lecture on how seven inches was the average dick length and also shut up, Richie. But he liked it. He leaned in and kissed it experimentally.

Eddie jerked like a live wire. "Stop that," he said, after a second. He was breathing heavily, though, like he'd been working out at his fucking gym. The extremely distracting image of Eddie in his tiny red shorts, grunting away at a rowing machine or something, almost made Richie miss what he said next. "I'm going to slip and break my fucking neck or something."

"You blow hot and cold, man," said Richie, with heavy emphasis on _blow_ , directly at Eddie's dick, and got another groan in response.

He also liked soaping up Eddie's feet, between his toes, and the smell of Eddie here, in the shower, alive. Eddie's hands in his hair. They didn't really say anything, which normally was a monumental effort for Richie, but he had something to do, to displace all his nervous energy. Before he got to his feet, he tilted his head back and kissed the unbroken skin where Eddie's wound had been, and Eddie moaned so loudly it seemed to shock him too.

"I," said Eddie, looking down at Richie, "it's been a long time, okay? Shut up."

"For once I wasn't saying an--"

Despite whatever the statistics were about slips and falls in the shower, Eddie grabbed Richie's face and kissed him, and it was Richie's turn to make embarrassing noises, especially when Eddie bit his freaking shoulder.

"Shit," said Eddie, "was that--did I break the skin--"

"I think I might be into that," said Richie. "Or maybe it's just you."

"Good," said Eddie grimly. "The human mouth is a cesspit, you can get all kinds of horrifying infections from a human bite."

And, moment broken, he turned the shower off and climbed out. He even dried off a little and then wrapped the towel around his waist, like Richie couldn't see his dick twitching under it, because the first thing Richie had gone for was his glasses.

Eddie was ransacking Mike's bathroom cabinet. "What the fuck," Richie asked, bemused, as Eddie shoved a tub of Vaseline into his chest.

"I can't find any condoms," said Eddie.

"Yeah," said Richie, trying to ignore the extremely large part of his extremely small brain that heard the word condoms and went straight into gonna have sex mode, "I have it on good authority, or Bill's anyway, that this place used to look like the hideout of a serial killer. I don't think Mike was entertaining too many lady friends up here." Eddie glared at him. "Hey, you can always rummage through Ben's luggage, in case he and Beverly didn't use all his condoms already. It's probably the only thing he still wears an XXL for."

"Beep beep, Richie," Eddie said, still searching through Mike's stuff.

Richie swallowed. "I, uh. I'm clean, dude. I know you're thinking, but what about that routine you have about the chlamydia, but that happened to one of my ghostwriters and it's the reason why I'm clean and also I get tested every six months just to renew the certification that hey, my dick isn't rotting off, even though I haven't technically gotten any action since 2014." And even that sounded more impressive than it was, because 2014 was when he'd had to fake-made-out with Robert Downey Jr for an indie comedy and two seconds into it had panicked, retreated to insults, and gotten kicked off the project and blacklisted by a distribution company for making fun of RDJ's lifts.

"Oh," said Eddie. There was a weird look on his face, kind of sad and kind of judgy.

"It's okay," said Richie. "If you've got the clap you can still give it to me, I don't--"

"I do not have the clap." Eddie shut the cabinet, turned around, bore down on Richie. It was sort of alarming how hot Richie found that, the intent in Eddie's dark eyes, the dumb modesty-preserving towel. "I-- Myra and I use condoms. After what my mom-- what with my mom--" He sighed, frustrated. Richie was so goddamn tempted to make a your mom joke, it was second fucking nature by now, but this was one of those things that Eddie still needed to work up the bravery to face. "I don't want kids. I mean, I got a vasectomy before we were even married, but you hear stories about spontaneous reversal and I just. Couldn't let her."

"Oh." Richie punched down the urge to be a dick again. He swallowed, and reached out to Eddie with the hand that wasn't holding the Vaseline. "Look, I know I say a lot of things about your mom--"

"If you even--"

"But I'm glad she had you, because I don't know what I'd do without you. I mean, I do know what I'd do, because I lived it, and it was awful, but I'm glad you're alive, Eddie. You're the light of my life."

Eddie's eyes were big and dark, and his jaw worked for a second. "Don't fuck with me, Richie."

"I'm not." Richie leaned and kissed his nose, because why the hell not. "I mean, apart from you, my life kind of sucks, so...."

"Okay," said Eddie. He put his hands on Richie's shoulders, tucked his face against Richie's neck. "That I can believe."

"Dick," said Richie, and slid his arm down around Eddie's waist. He was warm, and damp, and alive, and Richie maybe wanted to hold him for forever.

"Takes one to know one," said Eddie against his throat.

Richie didn't know how long they just stood there like that in Mike's pale green and mustard brown bathroom, breathing together and dripping on the tiles, but at some point he became aware that his right arm was falling asleep and the edge of the jar of Vaseline was digging into his skin. "Hey, are we still going to fuck?"

"Fucking romantic you are."

"I'll buy you flowers," said Richie, squeezing Eddie's ass through the towel--it was a nice ass, a really nice ass.

"You've never bought flowers in your life."

"I'll grab a bunch of flowers out of someone's garden, wrap them in newspaper, and pretend I bought them for you?"

"That," said Eddie, stretching up to kiss his cheek, "sounds like the Richie Tozier I know and love."

It was such a massive fucking turn-on to be told that Eddie loved him. Richie thought his heart might have stopped, possibly from the strain of sending all of the blood in his body to his dick. They stumbled out of the bathroom, Eddie's hands everywhere, Richie unfairly stuck with only the one since he was holding the Vaseline, Eddie's teeth on Richie's lips, his earlobe, his freaking nipple, at one point, and Richie trying to rub his thigh against Eddie's erection through the towel because Eddie got even more intense and handsy when frustrated. Richie's knees hit the back of the sofa bed, which Ben and Bev had made up before they'd left for the ritual because no one wanted to fold it out and put on the sheets at ass o'clock in the morning, and maybe they'd thought the ritual wouldn't work, or maybe they'd thought Richie wouldn't make his move, or maybe they'd thought Eddie wouldn't respond the way he did, or maybe they thought Eddie was capable of sleeping in Mike's loft without a panic attack. Richie didn't care, he was just glad he didn't have to stop making out with Eddie to do it, although honestly he'd just have dragged him down onto it in sofa form and rubbed off against Eddie's ridiculous abs and cared about the upholstery in the morning, except that was a lie because Richie never would have cared about the upholstery.

At some point he became aware of Eddie reaching for the Vaseline, which had migrated towards the edge of the sofa bed, almost to the crevice between arm and mattress, as if to give them some privacy. "Hey," said Richie, "I hope you know what you're doing." Because he didn't. He knew, in theory, because it was 2016, and he was closeted, not blind and deaf and ignorant, and also he had an annual gig doing recordings for the Bad Sex Awards on the basis of him looking like the kind of guy who'd write and read the kind of thing that'd be nominated, but it wasn't like he'd ever done any of this before. And he was too paranoid to watch gay porn in case anyone found out, and straight porn was depressing enough even without anal.

He had faith that he and Eddie could muddle through it, since they'd defeated an intergalactic spiderclown twice without training, but it was, so to speak, Richie's ass on the line and some--any--reassurance would be nice.

Eddie bit his lip. "I've done the research."

"Wait, when did you have ti--"

"Before I was dead, jackass," said Eddie, unscrewing the Vaseline. He was doing that thing where he was embarrassed and didn't want to make eye contact and Richie had missed that, it was so fucking cute. "During crunch time, my team lets people pick shit to show on the conference room TV where we're working, and this one finance bro," he dipped his fingers into the Vaseline and Richie shivered, "is always putting on gay porn, and I was pretty sure it wasn't an accurate depiction because people would end up in a hospital, so I researched it."

"Oh." Richie swallowed, as Eddie began smoothing out the Vaseline on his fingers and Richie kind of wanted them in him, right now, instead. "And what did your research tell you?"

Eddie leaned forward to kiss Richie's chest--shit, was his rib cage an erogenous zone now?--and stuck two fingers in, and, oh, shit, Richie wasn't going to be able to make any jokes about Eddie's gay sex research because his brain was about forty percent in his dick and forty percent in his prostrate and-- "Fisting is incredibly dangerous and can result in permanent damage."

Richie tried to nod. He spread his legs wider. "Fisting is off the table, then. What else?"

"You never go ass to mouth," said Eddie, and added a third finger before Richie could say anything. "And there's a gay porn parody of your act called Richard Ass to Mouth and I've watched it, like, ten times." His fingers twisted, Richie shouted, and Eddie's dick was twitching, like-- "Or twenty times."

They were totally going ass to mouth. "Wait, you watched porn about me?"

"It was degrading," said Eddie. "Worst five dollars I've ever spent."

"You _paid_ for porn about me?" Richie put one hand over his heart. "Screw flowers, Eds, that is a whole song and declaration of fa--"

Eddie took his fingers out, slid his dick in, and Richie's brain went completely offline. He had a dick in him. He had a dick in him, and it was Eddie's dick. He had a dick in him, and it was Eddie's dick, and Eddie was here, with him. He had a dick in him, and it was Eddie's dick, and Eddie was here, with him, and Eddie was alive.

"Richie?" Eddie asked. He was cupping Richie's face, his thumb rubbing at Richie's cheek. "Am I doing this wrong? You're crying."

"Oh," said Richie. That checked out. "No, it's good, it's just--I'm so glad you're not dead."

"Yeah," said Eddie. He couldn't lean that far over, not if he wanted to stay balls-deep in Richie, but Richie thought he saw a relieved smile on his face. "It's kind of strange, but I'm glad I'm not dead either. Myra and my mom, they were obsessed with keeping me alive, but I never really felt like I was living."

"You feel like you're living now?"

Eddie made a sharp thrust. "This feel like I'm living?"

"I don't know," said Richie, "I've never been fucked by a corpse before, so--" Eddie grabbed him, manhandled his thigh, shifted position, thrusted again. "What, are you seriously being picky about--fuck!"

"I was trying to find your prostate." Eddie was breathing too hard to sound smug. "Nailed it."

"Fuck fuck fuck," said Richie, flailing out to pull him closer, "do it again, Eddie, do it--"

Eddie did it again. Richie swore, dragged him closer, arced up, tried to give Eddie hickies everywhere he could reach, and then came with a cry and some more actual crying.

"Richie," said Eddie, his hips shaking against Richie's, one of his hands reaching out to try to hold Richie's and ending up half-curled around his wrist, a couple of fingers digging into Richie's palm, "it's okay, I'm here, I'm not going anywhere, I--" His face twisted and he gasped and for a second Richie thought _oh fuck oh fuck_ and then he realized nothing had stabbed Eddie through the torso, that was his o face, and that was good but it was going to be super confusing for a while.

"You know," said Eddie, from where he was slumped over Richie's chest, "from my research, I thought the coming untouched thing was really improbable."

"What can I say," said Richie, and wrapped his arms around Eddie. There was a wetness in his ass and he was surprisingly okay with it. "Your dick is magic."

"Richie--"

"Dude, who brought you back from the dead?" He pulled Eddie close to him, despite the stretch. "Magic. Now shut up and enjoy the afterglow."

Eddie did, for all of ten minutes, before he tried to pull away. "I'm not going to vanish in the night," he grumbled into Richie neck. "You don't have to be an octopus about it."

"Yeah, I do," said Richie. "Admit it, you're into that. You paid another five bucks for a hentai version of my act called Squidchard Tentaclemouth--"

"The tentacles are their arms, dumbass. Their mouths are beaks."

"--and you fantasize about getting these suckers all over you--"

Eddie pulled Richie down by the hair and kissed him forcefully. It was only spoiled a little by the yawn halfway through. "Shut up, Richie."

Richie smiled and tugged Eddie even closer, wrapping his legs around Eddie's knees. There were no further complaints about octopuses. "I know."

**Author's Note:**

> I would like to thank everyone who encouraged and/or enabled me in the process of writing this fic, and to reassure them that I'm not _necessarily_ going to write sequels with meaningful ass-to-mouth or meaningful consentacles.


End file.
